It was he who already stood in the Dark; and they had walked away from the shadow, into what they knew.
He turned, to seek the edun, the Shrine’s comfort for his mood; and his heart chilled at what he saw along the lower ridges, with row upon row of shadows moving there.
Dusei.
They ringed the regul town in every place that offered solid ground. Ha-dusei, wild ones, and dangerous.
The dusei of the edun had not returned.
And there were far too many of the ha-dusei, far too many.
The sky roiled overhead, stained with red and sullen gray: stormfriends, the dusei, weather-knowing. In the days before the edun stood, they had watered here below: the Dus plain, the lowland flats were called. They came as if they sensed change in the winds, they came as if waiting the regul departure, which would give the Dus plain back to the dusei.
Waiting.
It was told of regul stubbornness that the first mri had warned the regul earnestly that they should build their city elsewhere, as the edun itself had been carefully positioned off the plain, in respect to the bond between mri and dusei; but regul had wanted rock for their ships to land on, and they had sounded the area thereabouts and found only on the Dus plain rock suitable for a port near the seal. Therefore regul had built there, and there had grown a city, and the ha-dusei had gone.
But dusei returned now, with the unseasonal rains and the destroying winds. They sat and waited.
And the dusei had left even the mri.
He shrugged, half a shiver, and walked inside and stopped, not wishing to bear that news to the Kel or to the she’pan. The Kel was in mourning, the she’pan still lost in dreams; and Melein, her Chosen, had; veiled herself and sealed herself alone in the Sen-tower.
He cast a yearning thought skyward, through the spiral corridors that massed over him, that Ahanal hasten, its coming, for he did not think that he could bear the endless hours until the evening.
And each thing that he thought of doing this day was pointless, for it was a house to which they would never return; and outside, the weather threatened and the lightning flashed in the clouds and the thunder rumbled.
So he sat down in the doorway, watching all the flats below the geysers’ plumes, predictable as the hours, their clouds torn and thrown by gale-force winds. It was a cold day, as few days on Kesrith were chill. He shivered, and watched the heavy drops pock the puddles that reflected a sky like fire-on-pewter.
A heavy body trod the wet sand: a whuff of breath, and a great dus lumbered round the corner, head hanging. Others followed. He scrambled up in terror, not sure of their mood; but wet and muddy-pawed, they came, and nosed their way past him into the edun, rumbling that hunger sound that betokened a dus with a considerable impatience. He counted them in: one, two, three, four, five, six. And last came the miuk’ko, the seventh, bedraggled and angular, to cast itself down in the puddle at the base of the slanted walls, drinking with great laps of its gray tongue at the water between its massive paws.
Three did not come. Niun waited, a relief and a disquiet growing in him at the same time—relief because a bereaved dus was dangerous and pitiable; and disquiet because he did not know how they had known. Perhaps the three that were missing had encountered their kel’ein.
Or perhaps, with that curious sense of dusei, they had known and sought them.
Perhaps they were far along the trail to Sil’athen. He earnestly hoped so. It would be best for both men and dusei.
He went to the storerooms in the cellar of Kath. The dusei must have care.
And first of all of them; he waited on the miuk’ko, that had left its post of mourning for the first time and then returned. He hoped it would be in a different mind.
But it would not eat. Perhaps, he thought, it had fed during its hours of wandering. But he did not believe it. He left the food on the dry edge of the step and went to carry portions to the others.
Save for the insistence and irreverence of the dusei, save for Melein, who grieved in her tower, the edun had become a place of dreams, and a sense of finality hung over everything: the dus by the gate, the old men and the old women. He crept about his tasks with the utmost quiet, as if he, living, walked in the caves at Sil’athen.
And in the evening the ship came.
* * *
The she’pan was asleep when they heard it descending; and they that were left of the Kel hurried out to the road to see it, and on tired faces there were smiles, and in Niun’s heart there was misgiving. Dahacha took his arm on impulse and pressed it, and he looked at the sun-wrinkled eyes and felt an unspoken blessing pass between them.
“Dahacha,” he whispered. “Will you come, at least?”
“We that have not walked will comes” said the old man. “We will not send you alone, Niun Zain-Abrin. We have made our reckoning; If we would not, we would have gone with Eddan, like Liran and Debas.”
“Yes,” said Palazi at his other side. “We will reason with the kel’anth.”
And it struck him like a blow upon a wound, that this now referred to Pasev.
The commotion of the ship’s landing was visible in lights, in flares of regul headlights that crawled serpent-wise toward that far side of the field, half-glow in the red twilight: regul eyes were not adapted to the night.
“Come” said Pasev, and they followed her into the halls and to the she’pan’s tower.
Melein was there, beside Intel, and she touched the she’pan’s hand and tried to wake her, but it was Pasev who laid a firm grip on the she’pan’s arm and shook her from her dreams.
“She’pan,” said Pasev, “she’pan, the ship has come.”
“And the regul?” In the she’pan’s golden eyes the dream finished and that keenness returned, focused and struggling for control. “How do the regul bear it?”
“We do not know that yet,” said Pasev. “They are all astir, that is all we saw.”
Intel nodded. “No contact by radio. Regul will be, monitoring; Ahanal will observe that caution also.” She struggled with, the cushions, a small moue, of pain upon her face, and Melein adjusted them for her. She sighed and breathed easily a moment.
“Shall we,” asked Dahacha, “Little Mother, carry you to the ship? We can bear you.”
“No,” she said with a sad smile. “A she’pan is guardian of the Pana: there is no ship-going for me until that care of mine is finally discharged.”
“At least,” said Dahacha then, “let us take you down to the road, so that you can see toward the port.”
“No,” said Intel, firmly. And then she touched Dahacha’s hand upon the arm of her chair and smiled. “Do not fear: I am in possession of my faculties and in possession of this edun and this world, and so I will remain until I am sure that it is my time; and yours will not be until mine is. Do you hear me?”
“Aye,” said Pasev.
Intel met the eyes of the kel’anth and nodded, satisfied; but then her glance strayed about the room, perhaps counted faces, and her eyes clouded.
“Liran and Debas left some time ago,” said Pasev. “We gave them farewell.”
“My blessing,” she murmured dutifully.
Pasev bowed her head in acknowledgment. “Until the she’pan dismisses me,” she said, “I serve you, and there are still enough of us to do what needs doing.”
“We will not be long about it,” said Intel. “Niun, child,” she said, and held out her hand.
He knelt at her knee and took her hand in his, bowed his bared head to her touch, felt her fingers slip from his and give that gesture of blessing.
“Go crosslands,” she said. “Go to the ship and talk with the visitors face to face, and hear what they have to say. Answer wisely. You may have to take decisions on yourself, young kel’en. And do not go carelessly. We have almost ceased to serve regul.”
Something passed his bowed head: he felt weight settle on his neck, and caught at it, and his fingers closed on cold metal. When he turned it and looked at the amulet on t
he chain he saw the open hand emblem of Kesrithun edun, and Intel’s silken fingers touched his chin and lifted his face to meet her eyes.
“Only one j’tal,” she said softly. “But a master-one. Do you recognize it, my last son?”
“It is an honor,” he said, “of a she’pan’s kel’en.”
“Bear yourself well,” she said. “And make speed. Time is important now.”
And she pushed at him with her fingers and he rose, almost fearing the eyes of the others, the kel’ein who might have been honored with such a j’tal; and he the youngest and least. But there was no envy there, only gladness, as if this were something in which they were all agreed.
He took off his houserobe, and there in the she’pan’s chamber, they all took hand in preparing him for the journey, hastening to bring him the siga that he should wear in walking the dusty lands, and zaidhe and mez; and they gave him their own weapons, both yin’ein and zahen’ein, finer than his own; and with a smile, a laugh that deprecated superstition older than memory among the People, Palazi unclipped a luck amulet from his own belts and gave it him, a maiden warrior, giving him of his luck.
“Years and honors,” said Palazi.
He hugged the old man, and others, and returned to the she’pan for a last hasty bow at her feet, his heart pounding with excitement. But as he received her kiss upon his brow she did not let him go at once, but stared into his face in such a way that it chilled all the blood in him.
“You are beautiful,” the she’pan said to him, her golden eyes brimming with tears. “I have a great fear. Be careful, youngest son.”
The People no longer believed in presciences with any great fervor, no more than he really trusted Palazi’s luckwish; but he shivered. There was mri-reason and regul-reason, and always to believe only what could be demonstrated by experience was the regul way, not the mri.
One who had lived so many years as Intel might have reasons he did not understand His whole life had been spent in the presence of the forbidden and the comprehensible; and she’pan Intel had been involved in most she’pan—keeper of mysteries.
“I shall fee careful,” he said, and she let him go then; he avoided the eyes of Melein when he rose, for if she’pan sen shared anything concerning him, he did not want to carry it with him on this mission.
“Do not trust any regul,” said the kel’anth. “See all that you look upon.”
“Yes,” he agreed earnestly, and took Pasev’s hands and pressed them gently by way of farewell to the brothers and sister of his caste.
He turned away quickly and left, long strides carrying him hurriedly down the spiraling stairs, past the written names of the history and heroes of the People and the truth of all the things that Intel had hinted at, that he could not read. He felt their meaning this day, the remembrance of his ancestors.
All, all that Intel had desired had come down to him; and she had been able, at the last, to let him go, to cast him like the as’ei in shon’ai. And she had not lost him. There was too much of love poured into him by these old ones that he could fail the wishes of Eddan, of Intel, of Pasev and Debas and Liran. They had made sure that he would succeed before they had launched him upon the she’pan’s mission.
He passed the main doors and closed them against the night, and saw there the monstrous bulk of the miuk’ko, a shadow beside the door. The great head lifted and the eyes stared at him invisibly in the dark.
Perhaps, he thought, optimism uncrushed in a hundred repetitions of this coming and going, perhaps this time. It would be good if it were this time at last, who needs me, who need him.
But it murmured and turned its face and laid its massive head in the mud. Male, female, or neither; no one had ever ascertained the sex of a dus, nor reckoned why they came to one mri or why they refused to come to another, whether this one had yet comprehended that Medai would never return, whether it grieved, or whether it starved out of simple stupidity, waiting for Medai to feed it, Niun could not fathom.
With a sad shrug he went his way, hardly having paused that half-step; but in this passing there was a difference, for things the due did not understand had changed, were changing, were about to change. And it was doomed, having rejected him.
Likely the humans would destroy the dusei. Regul would have done so gladly, if not for mri protection. The size and the slow-moving power of dusei was very like that of regul, but regul instinctively hated the dusei. Regul could not, as mri could, become immune to the poison of the claws; they could not, as mri could, abandon themselves to the simplicity of the beasts. Therefore regul fled them.
And the unease the contact of the dus had left in him stayed the while he walked down toward the flats, toward the ghostly plumes of geysers under the windtorn clouds: He smelled the wind, felt the familiar force of it, like some living thing.
He found himself looking at the familiar places that he had seen and known all his life, and thinking of each: this is almost the last time. There was excitement in his heart and an uncertainty in his stomach that was far from heroic and cheerful. His senses were alive to the whole world, the scents of the earth, acrid and wet, the feel of the damp hot breath of the geysers, that each had their name and manner.
His world.
Homeworld.
Impermanent as the wind, the Kel, but capable of loving the earth. It struck him that they did not know where they were going, that Intel spoke of the Dark as if it were a place, as if it had dimension and depth and duration like the world itself. It came to him that after leaving Kesrith he might never feel earth under his feet again: a Dark with promise, the she’pan had insisted; but he could not imagine what it promised.
And hereafter to deal with kel’ein who were not old, long-thinking men—kel’ein who knew only war and were touchy of their pride and their prerogatives of caste, in a way that the gentle Kel of Kesrith had never been.
To live among the Kel of strangers, where there were kath’ein, who would be his for the asking, and the chance to get children, and to see his private immortality. He would be son to one she’pan, truebrother to another, honored next whatever fen’ein, Husbands, she would choose to sire her children on the kel’e’ein and the kath’ein of the edun, if first he survived the combat of succession.
Choices spread before him in dazzling array, in dizzying profusion a future full of things neither stale nor predictable nor sure.
He walked swiftly, where reeking sulphur and steam obscured his way, where water dripped from recently sprayed rocks and the heat underground prepared further eruptions. He knew his timing to a nicety. The thin crusts on the right—boiling water and mud underlay much of that ground. The edge that he trod would bear a mri’s weight, but not that of a dus or a regul. Regul had learned bitter lessons about Kesrith’s flatlands; they did not stray now from the safety of their vehicles and aircraft and carefully chosen roads and landing sites. It would take a long time for humans to learn the land, if they would ever dare leave the security of the regul city.
Some would surely die learning it A few mri had done so.
He could cease to care what humans did. They would gather up the People and go, all of them, Dahacha and Palazi and the others; and Intel too—they would persuade her too, though she was old and very tired of straggles; she could at least begin their journey.
And then they could leave without even wanting to look back.
He gazed at last from the long white ridge that was above the port and saw the shape of the regul ship Hazan and opposite it, the new one of Ahanal.
Ahanal—the Swift.
He slid down the moonlit ridge in a white powdering of dust, and crossed the long slope to the lower ground.
And a shadow flowed among the rocks, large and menacing. He turned, hand on his pistol, and looked up at the hulking form that had mounted a ridge.
Ha-dus. For a moment he did not breathe, did not move. Three others showed. Silent, the great beasts could be, when they stalked; but they did not stalk him. He had only distu
rbed their vigil.
He remained still, respectful of their right to be here, and they snuffed the air and regarded him with their small eyes, and finally gave that explosive question sound that indicated the fighting-mood was not on them.
Pardon, brothers, he wished them in his mind, which was the best way to deal with a strange and skittish dus, and backed a few paces before he edged on toward his former course: language the dus understood, a matter of movements that one made and did not make.
His hand shifted from the pistol to the amulet at his breast. Not the moment to risk his life with the ha-dusei, far from it; he walked more slowly, more cautiously, remembering Pasev’s admonishment to use his eyes and his wits.
They let him go, and when he looked back they were no longer there.
He walked from the white dust to the artificial surface that covered the firm rock of the north rim area; and there was a fence, a laughable affair of wire screen that could stop, nothing that was truly determined, not on Kesrith. He burned it, made himself a door in it, with fine disregard for regul obstructions on the free land. Any mri would do the like rather than walk round a fence, and regul met the like with outrage; but it was the mri way, and in this mri would not oblige the masters.
Bloody-handed savages, he had heard one of the regul younglings call him in the town.
But regul built fences and made machines that scarred the earth, and tried to divide up space itself into territories and limits and parcels to be traded like foodstuffs and metals and bolts of cloth. It was ludicrous in his eyes.
He walked amid the great tangle of abandoned equipage and skeletal braces and vehicles—as he had foreseen; a vast graveyard of vehicles and machines, a clot of metal so tightly jammed together that he had to detour round the whole of it, a heap of vehicles and sleds and aircraft indiscriminately mixed as if some giant hand had piled them there, the vehicles that had brought but the inhabitants of all the settlements the regul had ruled. And there, there a great burned area, a tower in charred and jagged outline against the port lights, an angular tangle of braces and more goods that the regul had cast aside as waste. Storm-shattered, burned; the damage at the port had then been very extensive. He looked about him as he walked, taking inventory of things he had once seen whole and what he saw now damaged, and he began to see reason for the regul’s distressed behavior.
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